Sunday on the Couch With Chicken and Beans

By MARK BITTMAN and SAM SIFTON

Published: January 28, 2004

TO us, good football food is like a strong defense. It sneaks up on you subtly, not revealing everything it has, and then bashes you over the head. Pizzas and chicken wings don't do that. Chili can, at its best, but chili is Texan, and the Dallas Cowboys lost to the Carolina Panthers in the first round of this year's National Football League playoffs.

For this weekend's Super Bowl, which is being played on Sunday, in Houston, we asked a couple of chefs, one from the Carolinas and one from New England, to give us their favorite one-pot game-day recipes.

We got a couple of blockbusters in return. And if Sunday's game isn't half as good as this food, it will not matter much: contented diners will probably be happily asleep on the couch. This is guy food of a particular sort. It is more complicated than burgers and guacamole, but brazen enough for fellows who wear Prada to the pregame.

First, your New England Patriots. Until he sold his share in the place last year, Steve Johnson was the chef at the Blue Room in Cambridge, Mass., a restaurant we consider among the top five in the world for Sunday lunch before watching a football game. Big flavors are Mr. Johnson's hallmark, executed with real finesse. Also, he understands priorities.

Mr. Johnson's recipe for pork and beans is that in spades — it is also the death of that innocent-sounding dish, the one we first ate from a can. Even more to the point for lazy weekend cooks, it takes almost no work after an initial browning of bacon, cubed pork shoulder and onions. Baked at moderate heat with the cover off for the last hour, the top becomes dark brown, almost black, with the meat and some of the beans caramelizing and becoming incredibly flavorful. If it is made a day or two in advance and warmed on the stove, this flavor increases in forcefulness yet again.

Ease of preparation is also a marker of chicken bog, a rich and peppery stew that hails from the coastal plains of the Carolinas. The name derives from the way in which the pieces of chicken sit in the pot, like hummocks in a bog.

It has since spread across the two states, according to Kathleen Purvis, the food editor of The Charlotte Observer in Charlotte, N.C. "Bog is one of those classic Carolina meals," she said. "It's clumpy, it's delicious, and you see it everywhere — at football games and Nascar race weeks alike."

Jon Gray of Manhattan, a computer programmer who was reared in the Carolinas, said he made and ate bog throughout his childhood, while watching Clemson football games. Now a Panthers fan, he is excited to cook for the team's first attempt at a national championship. "We've never had a Super Bowl to make bog for," he said. "But I imagine it'll be as good."

Recipes for bog are as various as the 146 counties of North and South Carolina. For ours, we turned to Robert Stehling, who runs the Hominy Grill in Charleston, S.C. Mr. Stehling's bog features just about every part of the bird you can name, save feet and cockscombs (and the latter would be not only an appropriate addition but a good one). For good measure, he throws in a "little" mixed sausage — at least a pound or two of breakfast links, kielbasa and Italian sausage. (You might also add a ham hock, for good measure.)

"It's not one of those precise things," Mr. Stehling said. "You just get it done, leave it on the stove and enjoy the game."

As outlined in the recipe here, the dish serves about eight hungry people, but the proportions can be adapted by anyone who can do a little fourth-grade math.

Neither of these dishes requires a ton of attention, and with the exception of presoaking the beans in Mr. Johnson's recipe if you think of it (and if you don't, don't worry, just add some more stock and cook it a little longer), neither requires any advance preparation save a trip to the supermarket. None of the ingredients are fancy.

And both can be — indeed, should be — cooked sequentially. By this we mean, do not do any preparation work before starting to cook. Instead, start by browning whatever needs to be browned. While that is happening, prepare the ingredients for the rest of the recipe. Whether it's chopping onions or peppers or butchering pork, these are steps that can be taken care of once you have already begun cooking.

The result? Everything goes faster until the thing is on or in the stove, at which point you can crack a beer, relax and get in front of the television for the pregame show.